


The Scientific Method

by knytkalas



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bondage, F/F, Girls Kissing, Shibari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 05:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18631879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knytkalas/pseuds/knytkalas
Summary: College campus AU. An accident involving a dog-leash reveals that fellow students Marceline and Bubblegum might have more in common than meets the eye.





	The Scientific Method

**It was as though** the little dog had planned out the whole thing from the get-go.  
   Marceline and Bubblegum didn't even know each other that well before their fateful dog-walk together. They shared a few classes, sure, but Bubblegum was majoring in organic chemistry and Marceline had long since vowed to stay as far away as possible from numbers and math. Like, physically. She made sure to hang out on the other side of the campus from the science faculty. That imposing building was the domain of the nerds and the geeks, and of Princess Bubblegum.  
   “So, are you actually a princess then?” Marceline asked, to fill the silence.  
   They were strolling side by side in the grove at the outskirts of the college campus, primarily for the benefit of Gunter, a happy spaniel who belonged to their drama teacher. The two of them had agreed to take the dog out for a walk while their teacher was out of town that afternoon. Bubblegum held on to the long leash, cruising by on her retro rollerblades as the curious animal sniffed its way along the path.  
   “No,” Bubblegum giggled. “That's just something they call me.”  
Marceline could see why. Not only had the girl dyed her cloud of cotton candy hair pink, pink was also the color of everything she wore, from her cute dress to her knee-high socks, bowtie and rollerblades. Even her trendy lab-coat had a clear hint of fuchsia; she’d probably washed it in the wrong machine once or twice. She glanced at Marceline.  
   “And you? Are you actually a vampire?”  
   “Is that what they say about me?”  
   They both considered Marceline’s raven hair, her ivory pale skin and rock’n’roll clothes. She had darkness in her eyes. She had black lipstick and spikes on her backpack.   And she wore a comically large sun-hat, which shielded her from even the slightest ray of sunshine.  
   “Well, maybe I am!” she boasted, baring her teeth. “Maybe I am a blood-drinking ghoul! What are you going to do about it?”  
   Bubblegum laughed at Marceline’s theatrics.  
   “I think I'm safe,” she smiled.  
   Those words seemed to have been Gunter’s cue. It seemed the dog had been waiting all day for her to say them. He took off like a cannonball, darting between trees like an animal possessed, and poor Princess Bubblegum got dragged along for the ride. She had Gunter’s leash looped around her wrist and the wheels on her shoes offered no resistance at all. Off they went like a dogsled, chasing after who-knows-what.  
   Marceline bent over double in laughter.  
   “Heeelp me!” Bubblegum cried as she swooped by.  
   “Try to land in the grass!” Marceline yelled after her.  
   Gunter veered around a lone tree and Bubblegum latched on to its trunk with her flailing arms and spun to anchor herself against Gunter’s stampede. But Gunter wasn’t done running yet. Tongue flapping gayly in the wind, he rushed in ever-shrinking circles around Bubblegum and the tree. The long leash looped around Bubblegum’s body, lasso-like, and quickly pinned her back to the trunk. Around and around the dog went, and for each lap his line encircled Bubblegum tighter and tighter. Her arms got trapped under the rope-spiral. She wiggled to get free, but as she did so the rope just seized more and more of her mobility, until she ended up standing almost on tiptoe. Rope crumpled her puffy dress and dimpled her flesh like ribbons around marshmallows.  
   “A little help here?”  
   Marceline was not laughing anymore. She stared at the restrained Bubblegum with wide, glossy eyes and her black lips slightly parted. A blush spread like bloodsplatter over her snow-white skin. It started in her earlobes, went down to her cheeks and continued all the way down her throat to her collarbones.  
   “Is something wrong?” asked Bubblegum from her tight spot by the tree.  
   “No,” Marceline coughed and collected her voice. “Nothing’s wrong.”  
   “Are you blushing?”  
   “No!”  
   Marceline turned and hid her face in her hands. She used the great parabola of her sun-hat as a shield, as her trusted aegis, to conceal her embarrassment from the world. But Bubblegum just shifted in her bonds to get a better look. She wasn’t fooled.  
   “You are blushing!” she lectured gleefully. ”You’re getting excited by this!”  
   “I am not!”  
   They glared at each other. Marceline had dropped her hat in defiance and revealed to Bubblegum the full glory of the rosy-fingered dawn on her haunting face. Gunter the dog sat in the grass nearby, beaming with pride. He jerked his leash a bit, and Bubblegum moaned softly when her end of the line constricted.  
   “I guess this is kinda hot actually,” she had to admit.  
   “Shut up. I’ll get you down.”  
   Stone-faced and silent, Marceline began unwinding the leash from around Bubblegum.

*

 **The next day or so** , Marceline sat by herself in the shade of the library building, doodling in the margins of her English Lit notepad. She didn’t care very much for English Lit, and this particular notepad had suffered the most from her fierce pencil. In many cases there were more black graphite than white paper visible, as if the darkness in her eyes had spilled down on the page.  
   Scratching furiously with her pencil, Marceline was well on her way to blackening an entire page, when she was interuppted by a sudden and unexpected _pop!_  
   Marceline looked up to see pink-haired Princess Bubblegum standing before her, blowing pink bubbles with her bubblegum. _Pop!_  
   “Hey Marcy, what’s up?”  
   Marceline dropped her pencil and quickly angled her notepad away from Bubblegum’s peeking eyes. She tried to look casual while covering the open page with her arm.  
   “Princess Bubblegum,” she said, flustered. “P-B. Peebz. How you doin’?”  
   “You know, I was just thinking about the other day. With the dog, you know. And the tree...”  
   “Yeah…?”  
   Bubblegum sat down next to Marceline on the bench. Her sugarplum softness was a far cry from Marceline’s skeletal appearance. Marceline tried to look at anything but her; the library, some passing students, her own boots. She needed to say something.  
   “What about the… tree?”  
   “I think I liked it.”  
   Marceline suddenly had to cross her legs to press down on the secret thrill that those words had sparked. Was she blushing again? Probably. A curse upon her pale, transparent skin! Bubblegum leaned in really close and whispered into her ear:  
   “I wanna do it again.”  
   The heat from Bubblegum’s breath ignited Marceline’s earlobe and lit it like a bright red beacon. The blush spread to the rest of her face. Marceline swallowed audibly.  
   “What, walk the dog?” she mumbled.  
   “No, dummy!” Bubblegum teased. “The other thing!”  
   She tipped over Marceline’s notepad with one finger, mercilessly revealing the private drawings thereon. Snakes and swords and angry skulls decorated the margins several layers deep, but both girls’ eyes quickly honed in on the central motif. It was a simple sketch of a female torso, nude but featureless, and it was lovingly crisscrossed with thin pencil lines in an intricate diamond pattern.  
   “You know something about this stuff, don’t you?”  
   “Maybe...” Marceline admitted reluctantly.  
   A supercharged silence hovered between them when Marceline couldn’t think of what to say next. Her whole focus was on reigning in, or at least hiding, her unasked-for arousal. Finally, Bubblegum spoke, softly.  
   “Can you show me?”  
   Marceline’s heart exploded.  
   She looked with awe into Bubblegum’s earnest eyes, trying to gauge the sincerity of the question. She glanced quickly around the campus area.  
   “Okay,” she said. “But not here. Do you want to come with me to my dorm room?”

*

 **“Sorry about the mess,”** Marceline muttered as she kicked an old pizza box in under the bed.  
   “I don’t mind,” said Bubblegum and stepped into the cramped space.  
   A little bit of sunshine shone in through crooked blinds and fell in stripes on large, black loudspeakers. Punk-rock pin-up posters plastered all four walls, and the spot above the unmade bed was crowned by an electric bass guitar. The guitar’s body was fashioned in the shape of a double-bladed battle-axe, that ancient sapphic symbol, and its color was as red as sin itself.  
   “Do you play?” asked Bubblegum innocently.  
   “Of course.”  
   Over at her bottom drawer Marceline produced the object she meant to show her guest. It was an old shoe box, battered and repaired with duct tape. Inside lay a collection of dusty pulp magazines with black-and-white pictures of ladies who were all tied up in various positions. Some were standing up, some were on beds or on the floor. Many were in various states of undress. Princess Bubblegum's whole face lit up. She leafed through the pages with great interest, sometimes pausing at a particular photograph to inspect it closer and sometimes comparing pictures from different magazines to note the similarities. Marceline stood a few feet back and tried to keep her cool. In the presence of pretty girls she never knew quite how to behave. She bit her lip unconsciously and twisted the hem of her red flannel shirt.  
Bubblegum found a picture of a model sitting tied to a chair, and held up the magazine to Marceline.  
   “Could you do something like this?”  
   “I guess...” Marceline said. “I don't actually have a lot of rope on hand...”  
   “But you've done it before?”  
   “Not really, no...”  
   Marceline tried to lean against a loudspeaker and knocked over an empty beer can.  
   “It'll be like an experiment then,” said Bubblegum. She slipped out of her lab-coat. “We have a hypothesis now. We have to verify it.”  
   “Um… Okay...”  
   Bubblegum placed a chair in the centre of the room and sat down on it. She corrected the folds of her skirt and then looked up at Marceline expectantly.  
   In spite of her initial trepidations, Marceline took to her task with confidence. She'd imagined herself doing this many times before. She too had studied the magazines with great interest, breathlessly following the flow of the bindings while touching herself at night. In her head she had already enumerated every twist and turn of the ropes over soft skin.  
   She began with Bubblegum’s arms. She folded them gently behind the back of the chair, where she crossed Bubblegum’s slim, poindexter wrists. The length of rope Marceline had gotten hold of was slightly rough in texture, and at the first touch of hemp against skin Bubblegum fluttered her fingers. She didn't pull away though, and so Marceline completed her wrist-tie and moved up to Bubblegum’s shoulders. Still using the same length of rope, she looped it twice around Bubblegum’s torso to pin down her arms. She tested the tightness and, satisfied, decided to move on.  
   Marceline unwound the second of the two coils of rope she owned. She aligned Bubblegum’s cute feet and began lashing her legs together at her ankles. She continued with her rope all the way up to Bubblegum’s plump and pastry thighs. Ther she placed her top-most loop just above Bubblegum's knees. She pulled it tight and watch Bubblegum's knee-high socks crease.  
   They were now at a point where Bubblegum wouldn't be able to easily free herself. But Marceline wanted to keep going. This is what defines art: when your craftsmanship rises above the level of the purely instrumental - and into the realm of style. Marceline knew style.  
   The time had come for her favourite part. Her signature talent. Returning again to her first rope she pulled a few vertical strands across Bubblegum's chest. These she weaved together with her horizontal loops and began creating an intricate design by braiding them between Bubblegum’s blouse-covered breasts.  
   Princess Bubblegum shivered.  
   “That tickles!”  
   “Hold still then.”  
   Bubblegum inhaled and held her breath in concentration. She was as acutely focused on the twists of the ropes as Marceline was, as if she too wanted to savour every sensation of it. Marceline placed her final knot right between Bubblegum’s breasts, perfectly centered: a cousin to her pink bowtie.  
   Princess Bubblegum's breathing had gotten so heavy that her chest was visibly heaving, and the strain against the rope design made her breasts bulge out like soft cream-puffs under the marzipan fabric of her blouse. Marceline got distracted. The two of them paused to admire this fabulous piece of art they had jointly created; not Princess Bubblegum the person, but rather the ropes that imprisoned her.  
   Bubblegum’s skirt had gotten hitched up a bit as Marceline worked, and Marceline hadn't bothered to restore it. Bubblegum didn't ask her to.  
   Marceline had only two loose ends left, one on each side. For completion, she crossed them once over Bubblegum’s constricted chest before reaching around, hug-like, to tie them off at the nape of her captive’s neck. As she leaned over Bubblegum she could feel her breath on her cheek, and suddenly Bubblegum’s lips captured hers in a move so quick it caught Marceline completely off guard.  
   Marceline froze up for a second, not knowing if she should kiss back or not.  
   But she did.  
   She dropped her rope-ends and pressed her lips roughly against Bubblegum’s.  
   Liquorice black on milky pale pink.  
   Marceline sat down on Bubblegum’s lap, straddling her bound legs, and Bubblegum strained desperately against her bonds to rise and meet her kiss. Marceline could withdraw slightly, a playful retreat, simply to feel how Bubblegum would strive to follow along, but not being able to. Bubblegum’s flustered frustration was like candy to Marceline.  
   She went back in, all tongue and teeth and thirst, as is the nature of vampire kisses.  
   When Marceline finally broke off their intimacy, to allow Bubblegum a chance to breathe, Bubblegum was at last the one who was lit up with a pink brush. Marceline took comfort in that.  
   “Hypothesis confirmed!” chirped Princess Bubblegum. “I _do_ like it!”


End file.
